This volume results from the "Second International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters" held in Kalamata, Greece, June 29-July 2, 2015. The conference covered particular topics involved in natural and man-made disasters such as war, chemical spills, and wildfires. Papers in this volume examine the finer points of disasters through: Critical infrastructure protection Resiliency Humanitarian logistic Relief supply chains Cooperative game theory Dynamical systems Decision making under risk and uncertainty Spread of diseases Contagion Funding for disaster relief Tools for emergency preparedness Response, and risk mitigation Multi-disciplinary theories, tools, techniques and methodologies are linked with disasters from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. The interdisciplinary approach to problems in economics, optimization, government, management, business, humanities, engineering, medicine, mathematics, computer science, behavioral studies, emergency services, and environmental studies will engage readers from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds.

This textbook provides a comprehensive overview of noncooperative and cooperative dynamic games involving uncertain parameter values, with the stochastic process being described by an event tree. Primarily intended for graduate students of economics, management science and engineering, the book is self-contained, as it defines and illustrates all relevant concepts originally introduced in static games before extending them to a dynamic framework. It subsequently addresses the sustainability of cooperative contracts over time and introduces a range of mechanisms to help avoid such agreements breaking down before reaching maturity. To illustrate the concepts discussed, the book provides various examples of how dynamic games played over event trees can be applied to environmental economics, management science, and engineering.

Key environmental issues, such as biodiversity and climate change, have in recent years become more pressing than ever. Where the critical papers in the early 1990s explained the difficulties of cooperation in tackling transboundary environmental problems, later works have analyzed the various alternatives, and increased our understanding of various institutional designs and negotiation protocols' impact on the success of cooperation. This collection brings together the most important articles on the game theoretic analysis of international environmental cooperation to both confront the cooperative and non-cooperative approaches to this, and demonstrate the diversity of methods used to analyze international environmental agreements.

Why do people in a business negotiation settle for less than each of them could and should receive? Two rational players face off in an economic game. Each pursues interests as conventional theory dictates, but all too often, the result is suboptimal. Why do they fail to capture what Dr. Young calls the cooperative surplus? Dr. Young proposes that the root of the problem lies in the philosophical assumptions underlying decision and game theory. The common understanding of economic rationality is fundamentally flawed, he says. It assumes that rational players are always self-interested and that they will make decisions on the basis of consequences. Arguing that no theory of economic rationality developed from this foundation can lead to the desired prescriptive results, Dr. Young maintains that a successful prescriptive theory of rationality must start from a different premise: the notion of actors as autonomous agents who act over and above their inclinations to express their identity.

Dr. Young advances his own notion of economic rationality, then seeks to establish rules by which rational economic players can jointly create a common base for business negotiation. The results of bargaining will then be in equilibrium, and a solution optimal to both sides can be reached. Already praised by philosophers in Europe for its innovative vision and practicality, this book is a must for business executives and attorneys engaged in business negotiations, as well as for their colleagues with similar interests in the academic community.

This second edition of Lessons in Play reorganizes the presentation of the popular original text in combinatorial game theory to make it even more widely accessible. Starting with a focus on the essential concepts and applications, it then moves on to more technical material. Still written in a textbook style with supporting evidence and proofs, the authors add many more exercises and examples and implement a two-step approach for some aspects of the material involving an initial introduction, examples, and basic results to be followed later by more detail and abstract results. Features Employs a widely accessible style to the explanation of combinatorial game theory Contains multiple case studies Expands further directions and applications of the field Includes a complete rewrite of CGSuite material

Maximizing reader insights into the roles of intelligent agents in networks, air traffic and emergency departments, this volume focuses on congestion in systems where safety and security are at stake, devoting special attention to applying game theoretic analysis of congestion to: protocols in wired and wireless networks; power generation, air transportation and emergency department overcrowding. Reviewing exhaustively the key recent research into the interactions between game theory, excessive crowding, and safety and security elements, this book establishes a new research angle by illustrating linkages between the different research approaches and serves to lay the foundations for subsequent analysis. Congestion (excessive crowding) is defined in this work as all kinds of flows; e.g., road/sea/air traffic, people, data, information, water, electricity, and organisms. Analysing systems where congestion occurs - which may be in parallel, series, interlinked, or interdependent, with flows one way or both ways - this book puts forward new congestion models, breaking new ground by introducing game theory and safety/security into proceedings. Addressing the multiple actors who may hold different concerns regarding system reliability; e.g. one or several terrorists, a government, various local or regional government agencies, or others with stakes for or against system reliability, this book describes how governments and authorities may have the tools to handle congestion, but that these tools need to be improved whilst additionally ensuring safety and security against various threats. This game-theoretic analysis sets this two volume book apart from the current congestion literature and ensures that the work will be of use to postgraduates, researchers, 3rd/4th-year undergraduates, policy makers, and practitioners.

Are people ever rational? Consider this: You auction off a one-dollar bill to the highest bidder, but you set the rules so that the second highest bidder also has to pay the amount of his last bid, even though he gets nothing. Would people ever enter such an auction? Not only do they, but according to Martin Shubik, the game's inventor, the average winning bid (for a dollar, remember) is $3.40. Many winners report that they bid so high only because their opponent "went completely crazy." This game lies at the intersection of three subjects of eternal fascination: human psychology, morality, and John von Neumann's game theory. Hungarian game-theorist Laszlo Mero introduces us to the basics of game theory, including such concepts as zero-sum games, Prisoner's Dilemma and the origins of altruism; shows how game theory is applicable to fields ranging from physics to politics; and explores the role of rational thinking in the context of many different kinds of thinking. This fascinating, urbane book will interest everyone who wonders what mathematics can tell us about the human condition.

This book is dedicated to applied gamification in the areas of education and business, while also covering pitfalls to avoid and guidelines needed to successfully implement for a project. Using different theoretical backgrounds from various areas including behavioral economics, game theory, and complex adaptive systems, the contributors aim to help readers avoid common problems and difficulties that they could face with poor implementation. The book's contributors are scholars and academics from the many areas where the key theory of gamification typically comes from. Ultimately, the book's goal is to help bring together the theories from these different disciplines to the field of practice in education and business. The book is divided into four parts: Theory, Education, Business, and Use Cases. Part I provides a foundation on the theory of gamification and offers insight into some of the outstanding questions that have yet to be addressed. In Part II, the application and value that gamification can bring within the education sector is examined. The book then changes focus in Part III to spotlight the use of gamification within business environments. The topics also cover educational aspects like improved learning outcomes, motivation, and learning retention at the workplace. Finally Part IV concentrates on the applications and use of gamification through a series of case studies and key elements that are used in real situations to drive real results.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the financial systems of major industrialized countries using the statistical framework of the financial accounts. After a discussion of how economists agreed to create a framework to monitor the financial linkages between surplus and deficit sectors, the book analyzes in detail the composition and the recent evolution of financial assets and liabilities for households (including public pension rights), firms and intermediaries. Next, the volume studies the convergence patterns of financial structures and their influence on the effectiveness of monetary policy within European countries. The final chapter unifies the previous pictures, showing how the effects of financial integration and global imbalances could have been foreseen based on the financial accounts. The analysis and information contained in the book will help the readers to understand many issues and challenges raised by the recent financial crisis.

This book features mathematical and formal philosophers' efforts to understand philosophical questions using mathematical techniques. It offers a collection of works from leading researchers in the area, who discuss some of the most fascinating ways formal methods are now being applied. It covers topics such as: the uses of probable and statistical reasoning, rational choice theory, reasoning in the environmental sciences, reasoning about laws and changes of rules, and reasoning about collective decision procedures as well as about action. Utilizing mathematical techniques has been very fruitful in the traditional domains of formal philosophy - logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics - while formal philosophy is simultaneously branching out into other areas in philosophy and the social sciences. These areas particularly include ethics, political science, and the methodology of the natural and social sciences. Reasoning about legal rules, collective decision-making procedures, and rational choices are of interest to all those engaged in legal theory, political science and economics. Statistical reasoning is also of interest to political scientists and economists.

"Game Theory for Economists" introduces economists to the game-theoretic approach of modelling economic behaviour and interaction, focusing on concepts and ideas from the vast field of game-theoretic models which find commonly used applications in economics. This careful selection of topics allows the reader to concentrate on the parts of the game which are the most relevant for the economist who does not want to become a specialist. Written at a level appropriate for a student or researcher with a solid microeconomic background, the book should provide the reader with skills necessary to formalize economic games and to make them accessible for game theoretic analysis. It offers a concise introduction to game theory which provides economists with the techniques and results necessary to follow the literature in economic theory; helps the reader formalize economic problems; and, concentrates on equilibrium concepts that are most commonly used in economics.

This book offers a unique and insightful econometric evaluation of the policies used to fight transnational terrorism between 1990 and 2014. It uses the tools of modern economics, game theory and structural econometrics to analyze the roles of foreign aid, educational capital, and military intervention. Jean-Paul Azam and Veronique Thelen analyze panel data over 25 years across 124 countries. They prove that foreign aid plays a key role in inducing recipient governments to protect the donors' political and economic interests within their sphere of influence. Demonstrating that countries endowed with better educational capital export fewer terrorist attacks, they also illustrate that, in contrast, military intervention is counter-productive in abating terrorism. Recognizing the strides taken by the Obama administration to increase the role of foreign aid and reduce the use of military interventions, this book shows the significant impact this has had in reducing the number of transnational terrorist attacks per source country, and suggests further developments in this vein. Practical and timely, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of economics and political science, as well as those working on the wider issue of terrorism. Presenting a series of new findings, the book will also appeal to international policy makers and government officials.

This monograph is devoted to the analysis and solution of singular differential games and singular $H_{\inf}$ control problems in both finite- and infinite-horizon settings. Expanding on the authors' previous work in this area, this novel text is the first to study the aforementioned singular problems using the regularization approach. After a brief introduction, solvability conditions are presented for the regular differential games and $H_{\inf}$ control problems. In the following chapter, the authors solve the singular finite-horizon linear-quadratic differential game using the regularization method. Next, they apply this method to the solution of an infinite-horizon type. The last two chapters are dedicated to the solution of singular finite-horizon and infinite-horizon linear-quadratic $H_{\inf}$ control problems. The authors use theoretical and real-world examples to illustrate the results and their applicability throughout the text, and have carefully organized the content to be as self-contained as possible, making it possible to study each chapter independently or in succession. Each chapter includes its own introduction, list of notations, a brief literature review on the topic, and a corresponding bibliography. For easier readability, detailed proofs are presented in separate subsections. Singular Linear-Quadratic Zero-Sum Differential Games and $H_{\inf}$ Control Problems will be of interest to researchers and engineers working in the areas of applied mathematics, dynamic games, control engineering, mechanical and aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, and biology. This book can also serve as a useful reference for graduate students in these area

This book covers recent advances in Complex Automated Negotiations as a widely studied emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The book includes selected revised and extended papers from the 7th International Workshop on Agent-Based Complex Automated Negotiation (ACAN2014), which was held in Paris, France, in May 2014. The book also includes brief introductions about Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiation which are based on tutorials provided in the workshop, and brief summaries and descriptions about the ANAC'14 (Automated Negotiating Agents Competition) competition, where authors of selected finalist agents explain the strategies and the ideas used by them. The book is targeted to academic and industrial researchers in various communities of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, such as agreement technology, mechanism design, electronic commerce, related areas, as well as graduate, undergraduate, and PhD students working in those areas or having interest in them.

Many experiments have shown the human brain generally has very serious problems dealing with probability and chance. A greater understanding of probability can help develop the intuition necessary to approach risk with the ability to make more informed (and better) decisions. The first four chapters offer the standard content for an introductory probability course, albeit presented in a much different way and order. The chapters afterward include some discussion of different games, different "ideas" that relate to the law of large numbers, and many more mathematical topics not typically seen in such a book. The use of games is meant to make the book (and course) feel like fun! Since many of the early games discussed are casino games, the study of those games, along with an understanding of the material in later chapters, should remind you that gambling is a bad idea; you should think of placing bets in a casino as paying for entertainment. Winning can, obviously, be a fun reward, but should not ever be expected. Changes for the Second Edition: New chapter on Game Theory New chapter on Sports Mathematics The chapter on Blackjack, which was Chapter 4 in the first edition, appears later in the book. Reorganization has been done to improve the flow of topics and learning. New sections on Arkham Horror, Uno, and Scrabble have been added. Even more exercises were added! The goal for this textbook is to complement the inquiry-based learning movement. In my mind, concepts and ideas will stick with the reader more when they are motivated in an interesting way. Here, we use questions about various games (not just casino games) to motivate the mathematics, and I would say that the writing emphasizes a "just-in-time" mathematics approach. Topics are presented mathematically as questions about the games themselves are posed. Table of Contents Preface 1. Mathematics and Probability 2. Roulette and Craps: Expected Value 3. Counting: Poker Hands 4. More Dice: Counting and Combinations, and Statistics 5. Game Theory: Poker Bluffing and Other Games 6. Probability/Stochastic Matrices: Board Game Movement 7. Sports Mathematics: Probability Meets Athletics 8. Blackjack: Previous Methods Revisited 9. A Mix of Other Games 10. Betting Systems: Can You Beat the System? 11. Potpourri: Assorted Adventures in Probability Appendices Tables Answers and Selected Solutions Bibliography Biography Dr. David G. Taylor is a professor of mathematics and an associate dean for academic affairs at Roanoke College in southwest Virginia. He attended Lebanon Valley College for his B.S. in computer science and mathematics and went to the University of Virginia for his Ph.D. While his graduate school focus was on studying infinite dimensional Lie algebras, he started studying the mathematics of various games in order to have a more undergraduate-friendly research agenda. Work done with two Roanoke College students, Heather Cook and Jonathan Marino, appears in this book! Currently he owns over 100 different board games and enjoys using probability in his decision-making while playing most of those games. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, cooking, coding, playing his board games, and spending time with his six-year-old dog Lilly.

Economic Games and Strategic Behaviour is a seminal volume which introduces a model providing solutions to economic games subject to repeated play. It develops a link between strategic bargaining and the theory of self-enforcing contracts to give insights into the long-term relationships between two parties, such as firms or governments, who meet in a negotiating situation. The author provides an original approach to strategic bargaining to find a solution to economic games in which cooperation cannot be enforced by a third party. He then applies this approach to a wide range of real life situations including international environmental agreements, bilateral trade agreements, collusion between firms in industry and bargaining between buyers and sellers in the market place. The author also discusses important policy implications as well as setting an agenda for future research. Economic Games and Strategic Behaviour is an original contribution to the existing literature which will be welcomed for providing accurate outcomes for situations in which conventional theories produce ambiguous results. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of microeconomics, game theory and industrial economics.

This contributed volume presents the state-of-the-art of games and dynamic games, featuring several chapters based on plenary sessions at the ISDG-China Chapter Conference on Dynamic Games and Game Theoretic Analysis, which was held from August 3-5, 2017 at the Ningbo campus of the University of Nottingham, China. The chapters in this volume will provide readers with paths to further research, serving as a testimony to the vitality of the field. Experts cover a range of theory and applications related to games and dynamic games, with topics including: Dynamically stable cooperative provision of public goods under non-transferable utility Strongly time-consistent solutions in cooperative dynamic games Incentive Stackelberg games for stochastic systems Static and inverse Stackelberg games in political economy Cournot and Betrand competition on symmetric R&D networks Numerical Nash equilibria using curvilinear multistart algorithm Markov chain approximation numerical scheme for infinite-horizon mean field games Frontiers in Games and Dynamic Games will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in games and dynamic games.

Energy production and supply, as well as sourcing and consumption, are becoming evermore important in a volatile world. In this book, attention is paid to prevalent energy issues from a finance perspective. The topics discussed cover markets, prices, regulations and firms. An international group of authors from both academia and energy practice provides in twelve chapters a state of the art of the energy markets in a finance environment. They do so by discussing the current knowledge and presenting empirical research in this quickly changing and developing field. This book is the first in a planned series on energy at a high scientific level organized by the Centre for Energy and Value Issues (CEVI).

This book reports on the implementation of evolutionary-game theory in the design of distributed optimization-based controllers. First, it discusses how the classical population-game approach can contribute to and complement the design of optimization-based controllers. It shows how the features of this approach can be exploited to extend their capabilities in the solution of distributed optimization problems, and examines density games in order to consider multiple coupled constraints and preserve the non-centralized information requirements. Furthermore, it establishes a close relationship between the possible interactions among agents in a population with constrained information sharing among different local controllers. It also discusses coalitional games, focusing on the Shapley power index and proposes an alternative method of computing the latter, which reduces computational time, as well as a different way of finding it using distributed communication structures. All the proposed strategies are then tested on various control problems, such as those related to the Barcelona water supply network, multiple continuous stirred tank reactors, various unmanned aerial vehicle systems, and a water distribution system. This thesis, examined at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and Universidad de los Andes in 2017, received the award for best thesis in control from the control group of the Spanish Committee of Automatic Control (CEA) in the same year.

The scientific and technical development of any kind of germplasm is regulated by a vast network of treaties, conventions, international agreements, and national and regional legislation. These regulations govern biotechnological innovations in plants and microorganisms, access to and use of plant genetic resources, and biosafety. This complex mix has made it difficult to arrive at global interpretations, due to overlaps, gaps, ambiguities, contradictions, and lack of consistency. The big picture is even more complex, as a series of scientific developments - gene editing in particular - have in some cases rendered these international regulatory frameworks obsolete. This book puts forward an innovative approach: a "Comprehensive Plant Germplasm System". The System is a cooperative game theory-based proposal for a binding international convention which would supersede all other conventions, treaties, national and regional legislation covering native varieties and traditional developments, heterogeneous plant varieties, microorganisms, biotechnological inventions, plant genetic resources, and biosafety regulation. In short, it offers a comprehensive framework regarding intellectual property, biosafety, and business regulation and covers all types of germplasm. If applied, the system is expected to yield higher productivity rates in crops and improved food biodiversity, as well as a new paradigm based on the promotion of innovation for "Agriculture 4.0."

The contributions in this volume have been written by eminent scientists from the international mathematical community and present significant advances in several theories, methods and problems of Mathematical Analysis, Discrete Mathematics, Geometry and their Applications. The chapters focus on both old and recent developments in Functional Analysis, Harmonic Analysis, Complex Analysis, Operator Theory, Combinatorics, Functional Equations, Differential Equations as well as a variety of Applications.

The book also contains some review works, which could prove particularly useful for a broader audience of readers in Mathematical Sciences, and especially to graduate students looking for the latest information.

This book collects some recent works on the application of dynamic game and control theory to the analysis of environmental problems. This collec tion of papers is not the outcome of a conference or of a workshop. It is rather the result of a careful screening from among a number of contribu tions that we have solicited across the world. In particular, we have been able to attract the work of some of the most prominent scholars in the field of dynamic analyses of the environment. Engineers, mathematicians and economists provide their views and analytical tools to better interpret the interactions between economic and environmental phenomena, thus achiev ing, through this interdisciplinary effort, new and interesting results. The goal of the book is more normative than descriptive. All papers include careful modelling of the dynamics of the main variables involved in the game between nature and economic agents and among economic agents themselves, as well-described in Vrieze's introductory chapter. Fur thermore, all papers use this careful modelling framework to provide policy prescriptions to the public agencies authorized to regulate emission dy namics. Several diverse problems are addressed: from global issues, such as the greenhouse effect or deforestation, to international ones, such as the management of fisheries, to local ones, for example, the control of effluent discharges. Moreover, pollution problems are not the only concern of this book."

During the past 20 years, behavioral and social scientists following advances in physics and mathematics have shown an increasing interest in complex, adaptive, self-organizing, dynamic systems. The appeal of this perspective is fueled by the fact that there are a handful of properties that are common to all dynamic systems that can be used to explain the spontaneous emergence of novel forms, the mechanisms of continuity and change, and the dynamics of a large number of interacting factors. From animal population dynamics to human neural processes, there is growing evidence that human individual and social interactions may be understood as a dynamic system. In the field of psychology, there was a flurry of books during the early 1990s that explored the dynamic human system. These titles, and those that have been published since, fall into two general categories: those that integrate dynamic systems ideas into psychological theories and those that provide methods of modeling dynamic human systems (see list of competitive titles below).

Despite the enrichment that dynamic systems principles have afforded psychological theories, the methods provided to test these theoretical assumptions have not been readily adopted. The reason is that, unlike the physical scientists, social scientists are not as familiar with the mathematical formulations (i.e., differential and difference equations) required for these methods, nor are their data particularly amenable to such manipulations or models. Furthermore, the psychological relevance of some of the parameters extracted from these methods (i.e., Lyupanov exponents, chaotic attractors) is very difficult to interpret. What is needed is a methodological middle road to bridge theory and analysis. The proposed book on the state space grid method is perfectly poised to provide that bridge.

State space grids were first developed by Marc Lewis and colleagues (Lewis, Lamey, and Douglas, 1999) to depict sequences of infant attention and distress. This technique has since been applied to the study of parent-child interactions (Granic & Lamey, 2002; Granic, Hollenstein, Dishion, & Patterson, 2003; Hollenstein, Granic, Stoolmiller, & Snyder, 2005; Hollenstein & Lewis, under review; Lewis, Zimmerman, Hollenstein, & Lamey, 2004), and peer interactions (Dishion, Nelson, Bullock, & Winter, 2005; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, & Hollenstein, 2005). At this time, there are projects in progress that extend this work into the study of marital interactions, young adult group drinking patterns, eye gaze and eye contact in response to questioning, diary studies, and peer pressure dynamics.
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Congruences are ubiquitous in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and related areas. Developing techniques for finding (the number of) solutions of congruences is an important problem. But there are many scenarios in which we are interested in only a subset of the solutions; in other words, there are some restrictions. What do we know about these restricted congruences, their solutions, and applications? This book introduces the tools that are needed when working on restricted congruences and then systematically studies a variety of restricted congruences. Restricted Congruences in Computing defines several types of restricted congruence, obtains explicit formulae for the number of their solutions using a wide range of tools and techniques, and discusses their applications in cryptography, information security, information theory, coding theory, string theory, quantum field theory, parallel computing, artificial intelligence, computational biology, discrete mathematics, number theory, and more. This is the first book devoted to restricted congruences and their applications. It will be of interest to graduate students and researchers across computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics.